Katherine Moen

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Nebraska at Kearney

To efficiently maintain task-relevant information in VWM, task-irrelevant information must often be suppressed or forgotten. The current study used a change detection/directed forgetting paradigm to further examine the forgetting process in VWM.We compared performance for color squares to depictions of real-world objects, in order to examine the im...

The flexible resource and the sudden death hypotheses do not take into account the role of LTM during a VWM task. According to the LTM transfer hypothesis, information in LTM can impact performance on a VWM task. The current study tested these hypotheses by exceeding VWM capacity and utilizing a precision measure. Objects stored in LTM had similar...

In hybrid visual search, observers must maintain multiple target templates and subsequently search for any one of those targets. If the number of potential target templates exceeds visual working memory (VWM) capacity, then the target templates are assumed to be maintained in activated long-term memory (aLTM). Observers must search the array for po...

Previous research is inconclusive on when visual working memory (VWM) can be object-based or feature-based. Prior event-related potential (ERP) studies using change detection tasks have found that amplitudes of the N200-an ERP index of VWM comparison- are sensitive to changes in both relevant and irrelevant features, suggesting a bias toward object...

Spatial reasoning is a critical skill in many everyday tasks and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines. The current study examined how training on mental rotation (a spatial reasoning task) impacts the completeness of an encoded representation and the ability to rotate the representation. We used a multisession, multimeth...

Talking on a cell phone can impair driving performance, but the dynamics of this effect are not fully understood. We examined the effects of leaving a voicemail message on driving when there are critical driving targets to attend to (crosswalks and pedestrians). Participants engaged in an ecologically-valid “voicemail” task while navigating a virtu...

To improve maintenance of task-relevant information in visual working memory (VWM), previously encoded, but no longer relevant, information can be suppressed or forgotten. However, it is unclear whether a cue directing attention to a subset of stimuli leads to complete forgetting for non-cued stimuli. The current study utilized a novel method of te...

Participants can learn to bias attention towards items in a scene that have a high probability of change (Beck et al., 2017). The current study investigated this effect using categories of stimuli that have shared features. We used unprocessed and processed foods because processed foods tend to have angular edges, whereas unprocessed foods tend to...

In this birth story, Katherine shares that she wanted an unmedicated birth. She planned a hospital birth with a midwife. During her pregnancy, she hired a doula and she and her husband, Corey, attended both natural childbirth classes and a natural comfort measures class. Katherine had an intense labor but was able to relax between contractions, and...

Are the attention strategies associated with better performance on a mental rotation task evident through eye movements? Previous research suggests that experts and novices use different attention strategies during mental rotation tasks. Experts tend to use feature-based strategies by only rotating select parts of objects, whereas novices tend to u...

Are statistical summary representations (SSRs) for multiple dimensions processed independently or are they part of a bound scene gist representation? Previous research suggests that multiple SSRs, the means for two sets of circles, can be computed with no cost (Chong & Treisman, 2005). However, there appears to be a cost for encoding averages from...